Movie Reviews

In a palatial old home filled with dead birds and 1960s amenities, 18-year-old India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska: Lawless) is searching for her birthday present. This year the box is empty and her father is a no-show at dinner. India is devastated when she discovers that her father was killed in a car crash.

In drab Kansas, a two-bit magician named Oz (James Franco: Lovelace) bamboozles country folk with black powder flashes and cleverly hidden wires. He dreams of greatness but settles for life as a glorified flimflam man in a traveling circus, seducing gullible farmers’ daughters.

What if the people who loved you turned out to be monsters? Could you change your worldview to survive in this new order? Or would the truth end up swallowing you whole?
Fourteen-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl: Für Elise) lives an idyllic life in World War II Germany. Blonde and blue-eyed, she’s the picture of youthful innocence, still more child than woman as she romps through fields in suspendered skirts and Heidi braids.

John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) is living lush with his new wife and young daughter. Well connected, well dressed and wealthy, he’s the American dream.
John’s son Jason (Rafi Gavron: Celeste and Jesse Forever) isn’t quite so happy. Bitter over the divorce of his parents, Jason reviles his father and his money. In a moment of petulance and idiocy, he agrees to have a large bag of Ecstasy sent to his mother’s house.

As one who thinks Die Hard one of the best action films ever, I must with a heavy heart urge all fans of John McClane to skip this movie.
In 1988, off-duty cop John McClane (Bruce Willis: Looper) walked into an office Christmas party and became a terrorist-killing legend. Twenty-five years later, McClane has dispatched baddies in office buildings, airports, the burroughs of New York and the streets of D.C.
The fatigue is starting to show.

In our world of Zoloft commercials, it’s become easy to believe that popping a pill will magically end your depression. What happens if those Prozac promises turn out false? What if there is no magic pill for your mental malaise? What if that magic pill makes you worse?

R (Nicholas Hoult: X-Men: First Class) is a directionless 20-something. Unmotivated, grungy and introspective, R spends his days wandering the airport, speaking in grunts when accosted.
R is also a zombie.
But unlike many zombies, R feels conflicted about his blood lust. He’s curious about the humans he feasts on and tries his best to remember what it was like to be a person instead of a predator. He collects objects that he deems especially human: magazines, records, toys.

Beecham House is a nursing home with a twist. Billed as a community for retired musicians, Beecham is a haven for symphony and opera stars awaiting their final curtain call. Instead of bingo, they perform arias and celebrate the birth of Verdi with an annual gala performance that brings them back to the stage.

Sheriff Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzenegger: The Expendables 2) left a life of action as a Los Angeles cop to police a small border town in Arizona.
Small town life gets a lot more exciting when Mexican cartel kingpin Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega: Una Pistola en Cada Mano) escapes from FBI custody. He jumps in a souped-up Corvette, takes a hostage and speeds toward freedom. The only thing standing in his way are the local yokels of Sommerton.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks that murdered 3,000 Americans, Osama bin Laden became the world’s most-hunted man. Ten years later, the search continued.
For CIA agent Mya (Jessica Chastain: Lawless), the search for bin Laden is an obsession. She takes a position in the Pakistan bureau and spends every waking hour tracking obscure leads and interrogating detainees.